Mm..cool but the last part where any civilization that has night lights would by definition burn all the fossil fuels and turn the place into a desert seems like an assumption based on only one possible trajectory of our own civilization, let alone all other possible alien civilizations. There's nothing to make death by warming and desertification any likelier than nuclear war or the development of clean fusion, or a plague or an invasion from another nearby procedurally generated earth-like planet.
Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
While I have some doubts some of your statements your comment still resonates.
Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions.
This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
The issue is, the locations where most humans live today, grew historically from the best spots our ancestors could find in the whole planet, taking many factors in consideration: proximity to water bodies, good climate, good agricultural lands, adequate rainfall, et cetera. These are not random locations, they grew around the best spots available. If climate changes, they tend to regress toward the mean, diminishing carrying capacity. Other places may even improve, from the POV of human habitability, but statistically those will not be the same we have a lot of people living today, but places like siberia, that historically were population voids, prompting the need for mass migration and mass resettlement in a world that is already full of borders, and all the associated problems this entails.
You are reading too much into my comment, i was just talking about the simulation being dumb.
But here’s a question for you, total arable land increases or decreases with a warmer wetter world? (We must consider soil as the soil in eg norther Canada is garbage and would take a millennium to improve)
A slight decrease is likely (~-5%). Output gains in cold regions are not expected to match losses from regions that will get too dry/hot, unless artificial irrigation use expands, putting further strain in water resources:
> Annual food caloric production is the product of caloric yield, cropping
frequency (CF, number of production seasons per year) and cropland
area. Existing studies have largely focused on crop yield, whereas how CF
responds to climate change remains poorly understood. Here, we evaluate
the global climate sensitivity of caloric yields and CF at national scale. We
find a robust negative association between warming and both caloric yield
and CF. By the 2050s, projected CF increases in cold regions are offset by
larger decreases in warm regions, resulting in a net global CF reduction
(−4.2 ± 2.5% in high emission scenario), suggesting that climate-driven
decline in CF will exacerbate crop production loss and not provide climate
adaptation alone. Although irrigation is effective in offsetting the projected
production loss, irrigation areas have to be expanded by >5% in warm
regions to fully offset climate-induced production losses by the 2050s.
Control F precipitation not sure why my mobile Safari won’t let me copy paste, but they specifically say that they don’t count for precipitation changes because it’s too complicated and in the future they might try doing that…
For what it's worth, the simulation does account (in a crude manner) for the heat causing increased water vapour uptake from the ocean and accelerated plant growth (which in turn increases the rate of carbon sequestration). I admit that the desertification at the end is a bit of artistic license to make the storytelling easier to visually convey, realistically things would be more complex than that. And it is just that, a story of one particular possible scenario, as I've written about elsewhere:
> “The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”
Back in 1996/1997 I worked on a CD-ROM game that simulated movement of the tectonic plates, as well as temperature, elevation, and precipitation, over millions of years. Amazing to see how evolution (heh!) of computing hardware and software have come so far in 28 years: https://www.kmoser.com/evolution/
I think you are the first person I come across that knows that game and you were an actual dev on it! So thank you! I played it when I was around 13(I think) and I loved it. The whole concept of simulating a planet and the animals on it was pretty much mind blowing for me at the time(it still is). I should have kept the poster that came with it...the different sapien evolutionary branches were really interesting.
Cool! It's admittedly an obscure game. My main contribution included the random generation and movement of the cratons. This involved mapping Cartesian to spherical coordinates but harder because each row of tiles was offset by half a tile's width from the rows above and below, like a brick wall.
We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult!
I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games.
After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
This is rad! I recently read Assembling California by John McPhee[1][2] - highly recommended BTW.
Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now.
There is an excellent hard science fiction book called permutation city that very related to this topic…it made me feel like i was in a dream when i read this post’s title
Egan is one of those rare writers where reading his book made me realize just how much smarter he is than me. Not even in a negative way, it's simply like listening to a lecture by a brilliant, brilliant man.
Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense:
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
> Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of information past the event horizon?
No, current physics has a bunch of hard limits on information.
> A new fundamental particle doesn’t necessarily make it soft sci-fi
Calling something a particle doesn’t matter here. It’s a fully formed computational device that happens to magically solve all problems.
Consider, how do you encode and read information from such a particle. Qubit’s are physical properties of something, such as spin. Is this particle supposed to have infinite properties which you can access with infinite precision? No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
> No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
As a general rule I consider this unfair. It's okay for science fiction to be set in universes that have different physical laws than our own. Hard or soft sci-fi has nothing to do with whether the rules match up to reality, only whether they're internally consistent and whether they are delved into in technical detail.
Sure, there is no known particle in our universe that could do this, nor is there any known way for such a particle to exist. Does that mean its existence in the story makes the sci-fi soft? Take a look at how it's described:
> They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.
Sure you could call it a MacGuffin, but it's not magic, it's clearly science (just within their universe). It's clearly explained to have been science. Maybe it's not explained in infinite detail, but it does not need to be. Nothing about this looks like soft sci-fi to me.
Nothing about qntm's other stories - Ra, Fine Structure, and a bunch of the short ones - seem like soft sci-fi to me either. I mean, seriously, Ra contains academic lectures[0] where the whole speech, parts of the equations, and the principles behind them are all actually explained to the reader in detail, not just glossed over. There is even an appendix where the actual in-universe mechanics behind the "magic" are explained.[1] And another one where a specific case of it is thoroughly considered and explained.[2] This is science. Fictional science, but that is what science fiction is. There's not really anything soft about it, imho.
I think you’re misunderstanding what the terms mean. Star Trek is filled with academic lectures, fundamental particles, etc but its underlying physics is soft.
Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Operating at the unknown edge where we don’t know what it takes to make AGI so under or overestimating the hardware requirements is fine. Tossing away our physics and replacing it with whatever is needed for the story to function is the definition of soft science fiction.
Granted degrees of soft science fiction exist. Jurassic Park is close enough to the boarder of Hard Science fiction it’s a little debatable, where Star Wars is fantasy with shapeships.
> I think you’re misunderstanding what the terms mean.
I was going off the Google definitions, oops.
> Star Trek is filled with academic lectures, fundamental particles, etc but its underlying physics is soft.
Yes, that's true, and I agree. Star Trek isn't really fully internally consistent or rigorous because advanced/alien technology is simply the setting. Most of it is about the people, not the science.
> Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Since when? From Wikipedia:
> The heart of the "hard science fiction" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself.
> One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically or theoretically possible.
Existing in a different universe from ours doesn't make it automatically soft, if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is. As an example, their book "Ra" seems absolutely like hard sci-fi to me, even though there exists within it an actual concept of "magic" (!), because (without spoilers) the phenomenon called magic is fully defined, and there is no element of arcanity to it.
But I guess you're right that this specific story might not count as hard sci-fi; though I don't agree that it's because of the particle's existence but rather the way it is regarded: the point of the story is to explore the philosophical implications of such a machine existing, not to explore the actual science of the machine.
Their other stories, like "Ra" and "Fine Structure", certainly explore the science of their respective universes/situations, not just the philosophical implications, and I would count both of those examples as hard sci-fi, having read both.
The very first line: “Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.“ Scientific rigor might apply in a fictional setting with different laws, but accuracy requires a universe similar to our own.
One of the references linked from Wikipedia wants not some consistent set of laws but also facts about our universe like the moon not having an atmosphere. https://books.google.com/books?id=PiphRocVYRwC&pg=PA187#v=on... Thus a platypus should be closely related to mammals even though it lays eggs. In a different universe different genealogies are possible even with identical physics, but that doesn’t fit our science.
So by “rigor of the science itself” it’s in reference to our science not the stories universe because:
> Existing in a different universe
Any story could work in some theoretical universe. Olympian gods could exist with the right physics and any child learning how the world works is exploring that physics.
> if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is
I think what you’re looking for is Rationalist fiction which cares about the consistency of the setting’s internal rules but not how close the physics matches ours. ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ fits as soft science fiction and rationalist fiction. The main character is definitely trying to understand how the world works and carries out many experiments, things just don’t fit our physics.
Meanwhile you can have Hard Science fiction with primitive humans exploring the ruins of our civilization who don’t have the slightest idea of the scientific method. That line between possibility and not is a meaningful line and we came up with words to describe it.
If you're going to accuse something of using magic, I'm surprised you didn't accuse Ra, which even has something called 'magic'. I've been reading Fine Structure this morning and it doesn't seem magical to me at all. It's about as magical as quantum physics would be, I guess.
I suppose even Ra still obeys the speed of light, though.
To deepen this tangent, I'll recommend Philip K. Dick's The Trouble With Bubbles which imagines 60s cocktail party guests showing off their miniature planet-scale terrariums.
I’m not sure I really know how to handle this. Do I just read the latest version linked at the top of the page? Or is the one offered by this like somehow more canonical or something? I’m not sure I’ve ever been faced with different versions of a fiction before. Just textbooks.
I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
Sure you have, if you've ever bought an Nth edition of a book (where N > 1). Editions aren't always just an artwork/formatting change, they sometimes contain changes to the text too.
I just love how a world-class quantum computer scientist who just made a discovery that just blows up everything known to mankind is up to the very end is worried about missing a bus.
I remember watching a (wonderful) T.V. show[0] that came out within the last couple decades, and feeling like a certain scene was definitely a nod to this story. The drama, and physics (and resolution) was done differently, but it left me in a similarly, pleasantly pensive state. [0] I almost made the mistake of naming it, or the director - but caught myself, realizing the context of this comment alone could be a major "spoiler".
Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for it these days :) )
U+200E before letters spelling out show in my comment. Just noting that while I would have enjoyed the show very much even if I had this "spoiler", it certainly would have lost some "magic".
you could use a url shortener to hide the link to the show's wikipedia page. For those who don't mind spoilers, they can know what you're talking about.
One of my favorite courses at university was energy policy analysis, where we played around with the EPPA model (developed at MIT) [0]. We made changes to certain parameters to see how things might work out, e.g. if cost of energy storage is reduced 10x.
Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job.
Not sure why, but all the shadertoy examples embedded in the page play at like 0.6 FPS for me. When I open the linked "final shader" on the shadertoy website I get 60fps just fine ...
Well you are in a way, what is a simulation ? It's just a set of rules you follow that are simpler than the more complex environment that it runs in: I suppose if we could "see" "outside" the "universe", we'd understand that maybe our reality is very simple and limited compared to the "reality" outside. Maybe this would be true infinitely, or maybe the outside reality would be much more logical than ours, and we'd accept it's finite.
But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but that's a very human way to think, might all just be random soup.
But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves. Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His existence.
That concept of God is stupid, some are tautological, and some are experiential. Eg the concept of God is love (if you have faith in the concept and reality of love being real).
I think modern people have so much faith in this reality, they'd have little chance accepting that it is other than it seems. Any evidence would have to be stark.
Actually, physics supports the probability that we live in a simulation. Our universe has the highest limitation of speed and the smallest units of length and energy.
Neuroscience, psychology, public opinion polls, and internet forums demonstrate that we do.
The problem is, the nature of this style of simulation, as opposed to the Bostrom theory ("the" simulation theory (singular, there can be only one)), makes it (nearly) impossible to realize.
This is both tragic and hilarious, especially since we have extensive knowledge of this flaw.
When thinking about this one, I always wonder if it even matters.. playing both "Yes" and "No" scenarios doesn't really offer any insight for me. Maybe it's a degree of nihilism but it makes me not get overwhelmed.
God created electromagnetism as a way to transmit power between the fusion plant and its simulated planet, and is now delighted that we also use it to trade Pokemons back and forth.
The music is "Adagio in D Minor", and probably cliche more because it's been used so much rather than because it was cliche when written. It was originally composed by John Murphy for the 2007 film Sunshine.
"Four seasons in one day / Laying in the depths of your imagination / Worlds above and worlds below / Sunshine on the black clouds hanging over the domain ..."
Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.